This Pen Still Writes After Being In A Woman's Stomach For 25 Years

Doctors finally discovered and removed this felt-tip pen from a woman’s stomach after being lodged in there for more than 25 years. The woman, now 76, came into the doctor’s office because she was losing weight and had diarrhoea. She came out of the doctor’s office one pen lighter.The pen, she said, was initially swallowed when she was “interrogating a spot on her tonsil with the pen she slipped, fell and swallowed the pen by mistake,” the case report says. When her doctor didn’t see the pen on the x-rays of her stomach when the incident happened, they dismissed her story of what happened.

After 25 years, the pen resurfaced in the woman’s stomach, and doesn’t seem to have done any damage.

The doctors decided to remove the pen, since there have been previous reports of pens causing internal injuries. After it was removed, the pen still worked!

“This case highlights that plain abdominal x-rays may not identify ingested plastic objects and occasionally it may be worth believing the patient’s account however unlikely it may be,” the author, Oliver Richard Waters, wrote in the paper, published in the journal BMJ Case Reports in 2011.